We Made It Ourselves | Beyond Kombucha

When Spiro Theofilatos says “oolong,” it sounds like a Sanskrit incantation. Theofilatos’s chanty-shanti tendencies might make some leery of his small-batch kombucha. Instead, it should alert you to the fact that this Spiro knows his tea — and this is what makes his Beyond Kombucha fizzy tonics so incredible.

“I have a passion for fine teas,” enthuses Theofilatos, the former director of waste-oil collection at Tri-State Biodiesel, where he convinced Yankee Stadium to give up its grease. He left the world of waste in March 2009 to pursue something “more holistic and health-oriented”: rolfing. At the same time, he started dabbling in D.I.Y. kombucha.

He wasn’t new to the effervescent elixir; he’d been hooked for five years thanks to “some girl out on the West Coast.” He didn’t enjoy what it tasted like at first, “but I liked how I felt,” he recalls. “After drinking it the first few days, you feel good. Then you stop getting sick. You have more energy. You feel more grounded; more settled.”

Theofilatos is big into well-being; he talks about Structural Integration and rigorously manipulating the body to promote optimal mental and physical health. And he makes kombucha. The guy’s practically a cliché.

Except he isn’t. He has been enchanted with tea since 1997. What do you want to know about pu-erh? Did you realize it’s generally fermented or that the tea leaves are harvested from very old trees and spend three months underground? He’ll happily inform you. “The monks,” he begins, as though telling a bedtime story, “took to burying the leaves because marauding Chinese warriors were raiding the stash, and an entire culture developed around it.”

Of course, he points out, kombucha is nothing more than fermented sweet tea whose byproducts include “a host of amino acids, B-vitamins and probiotics.” As per Theofilatos, the Chinese word means “tea fermented by mushrooms.” But this, he clarifies, is a misnomer, since the fermenting agent is a “symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, not an actual mushroom or fungus.”

If you’re Theofilatos, the syllogism couldn’t be clearer: use quality tea and get a better ‘bucha. That’s what he set out to do, along with making a tea-based energy drink for creatures of the night. Formula One was his original recipe. “It was something I threw together based on Red Bull,” he says. “I wanted to tap into the dance-music scene.” It’s fermented sweet tea with guarana (a highly caffeinated Brazilian berry), ginseng, crystallized ginger and ginger root. For this dance-friendly recipe, he blended two teas: yerba maté and green gunpowder. Revelers went crazy for it: “They suck it down and dance for hours,” Theofilatos says.

He tried a few more flavors — a pu-erh and an oolong. Once his friends began placing orders, he introduced it to the people at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y.

There he was in Astoria, brewing his brew, rolfing it up, when a masseuse named Masha with whom he bartered for body work told him that her friends were doing exactly the same thing in nearby Greenpoint. “It seemed uncanny,” says Theofilatos, who immediately got in touch with the Russian-born Victoria Taub, who is known as Vicka, and her boyfriend, Hoover Le. He tasted their kombucha and realized “it was so much better than anything I’d ever done.”

In May, the triumvirate formed an LLC and fine-tuned six flavors, each anchored by a different tea. Theofilatos is the leaf-master, galvanizer and spokesperson; Taub, who grew up drinking her grandmother’s homemade grib (what they call the drink in Russia, its mother country), is the mystic-brewer, and Hoover, a longtime recording engineer in the music industry, deals with the slippery matter of alcohol content.

According to the passionate founders of Beyond Kombucha, the substance is “a health product full of amino acids that are good for your ligaments, joints and connective tissue” and improves your “collagen, skin, digestion and immune system.” But it does have a bit of an alcohol problem. As the fermentation takes place, the “mother” (the yeast-bacteria compound) generates a little something extra. The Beyond sippers ingest anywhere from .9 to 1.4 percent alcohol, which isn’t much, but it’s enough to count.

“You need to drink four to get an alcohol buzz,” says Theofilatos, who asserts that “it has homeopathic properties at that level and acts as an astringent; it’s one-fifth of the alcohol in a glass of wine.” Still, efforts have been made to relegate kombucha to hooch status. “How many medicines contain alcohol?” asks Taub. “We don’t call ours a medicine.”

The Beyond Kombucha gang is trying to assemble a co-op of fellow brewers to take the issue to Congress. “We are not a beer. We are not a wine. We need a new category,” Theofilatos says.

You won’t be thinking much about that drama when you unscrew the bottle top. Instead you’ll be invigorated by the purity and complexity of flavors these idealists have achieved. “It’s not rocket science,” Theofilatos says, “but it takes a while to get it really perfect.”

Who can say what perfect tastes like, especially where kombucha is involved? What can be said is that the Formula One has the “smoky wine” notes its bottle promises. The Pu-erh, which is aged four years and fermented in oak barrels, is just as Theofilatos describes: “It comes through almost like a Guinness.” The newest release, the white-tea-based Snowbud Ginger, is “so light, like a sour ginger ale.” For the decaffeinated set, there’s Rooibos Honeybush, with its hard-cider-like qualities. The current oolong on offer is the Formosa, a dark and rich beverage that suits the season. In the spring, they’ll replace it with a lighter, floral green oolong.

It’s not just the exceptional tea that makes Beyond Kombucha’s creations, well, beyond; it’s that they don’t add a whole bunch of unnecessary ingredients to the brews, and they don’t mess around with the sugar source. “We don’t need all the berries and the fruit,” Theofilatos says. “That’s all fructose … it produces alcohol faster than any other sugar. Sucrose, or pure cane sugar, doesn’t produce alcohol as readily. It’ll carbonate.”

Plans include outfitting the building in which they steep, ferment and bottle with solar paneling. At some point, they’d also like to open a kombucha bar where all flavors would be on tap, food would be served, open-mic nights held and a yoga studio attached. For now, they’re excited about local sales (Garden of Eden just became a client; other points of purchase include Dépanneur in Williamsburg and Choice Greene in Fort Greene) — and, above all else, the miracle of tea.